Like their historical namesakes, the founders of The Pirate Bay have escaped authorities for a number of years by travelling across the high seas, hiding behind a number of aliases.

The web’s Long John Silver was known as “TiAMO”, its Jack Sparrow as “Anakata”.

While the world’s most notorious file-sharing website has travelled from domain addresses in Sweden, Greenland and Iceland to the Caribbean, the people who started The Pirate Bay have also been running since falling foul of Swedish authorities.

After a Swedish court issued one-year sentences for copyright violations in 2009, one founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (Anakata of the internet) went on the run. He was eventually arrested in Cambodia in 2012 and extradited to Sweden, where he served his sentence.

After being released, he was dispatched to neighbouring Denmark, to answer hacking charges. This week, he and an associate were sentenced to three and a half years for hacking into a server belonging to the US tech giant CSC, which handled sensitive information for Danish authorities.

The case was described by prosecutors as the “largest hacking case to date”. Then yesterday, it was time for another of The Pirate Bay’s founders – TiAMO, or Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij – to face justice.

He was arrested on an Interpol warrant while attempting to cross into Thailand from Laos at the Nong Khai immigration point, about 300 miles north-east of Bangkok, police said yesterday.

According to the regional immigration Police Commissioner, Major General Chartchai Eimsaeng, a film association in the US had hired a Thai lawyer to search for Neij and his photo had been distributed to border officials.

Both film and music studios have been pursuing the Pirate Bay founders for years over the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.

The Pirate Bay catalogues links to downloadable torrent files for films, television shows, music, games and other media, which are often shared in breach of copyright. The website’s front page features an image of a pirate ship, flying a sail emblazoned with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright-infringement campaign Home Taping Is Killing Music.

“It might have been a coincidence, but he [Neij] was wearing the same grey T-shirt that was in the photo,” Commissioner Chartchai told the Associated Press.

He added that the 36-year-old Swede had lived in Laos since 2012 and travelled to Thailand on 30 occasions. It is thought that TiAMO has a house in Phuket and around £100,000 in a savings account. Neij’s wife was in the car with him when he was arrested.

Jonas Nilsson, Neij’s lawyer in Sweden, said his client said he “would be transported to Sweden”.

After the 2009 conviction, The Pirate Bay’s founders were ordered to pay Skr 46 million (£3.9m) in damages to the entertainment industry. Their appeals were denied by Sweden’s high court.

In May, another founder, Peter Sunde, was arrested in the Swedish county of Skane after nearly two years on the run. He had been wanted by Interpol since 2012 after being sentenced to eight months for breaching copyright laws.

Carl Ulf Sture Lundstrom, whose company Rix Telecom provided equipment and services to The Pirate Bay, has already served out a four-month sentence as part of the same case.